Agent Zero vs Crush

Agent Zero

Self-hosted under the MIT licence, with nine releases in the 90 days to 12 October 2026 and breaking changes listed in the release notes. The agent runs shell commands in its container with no approval step, the web interface has no login by default, and five CVEs from the past year have no published GitHub advisory.

Crush

Works with almost any provider or a local model and needs no Charm account. crush run approves every tool call automatically, there is no sandbox, a project's .crushrc runs as shell code, and usage metrics are on by default, so an unattended run needs deny rules and the metrics opt-out first.

Agent Zero

1. Set a UI login and password in Settings before publishing the port or opening a tunnel. The default has none
2. Fill allowed_users, allowed_numbers or sender_whitelist before enabling a channel. An empty list accepts every sender
3. Enable the Infection Check plugin when the agent reads mail, web pages or MCP results. It ships disabled
4. Run v2.12 or later. It fixes a Telegram webhook authentication bypass and a WhatsApp media path traversal
5. Call POST /api_message with the X-API-KEY header. The token changes when the UI login or password changes

Crush

1. Add permissions deny rules or a PreToolUse hook before crush run. It approves every permission request in its session
2. Read .crushrc, crushrc and crush.json in a cloned repository before running Crush there. They execute as shell code at startup
3. Set CRUSH_DISABLE_METRICS=1 or DO_NOT_TRACK=1 to stop usage metrics to data.charm.land
4. Wrap crush run in your own timeout. It has no turn, time or cost limit flag
5. Configure a provider by environment variable or crushrc first. With none, crush run exits with an error asking for interactive setup